The memo, which contains a number of factual errors and misleading statements, lays out two courses for a President Romney: Either immediately promise to rescind Obama's executive order upon taking office, or initiate a "comprehensive review" of interrogation policy that ends with Romney rescinding Obama's executive order. Though the outcome of the "review" is never in doubt, the memo states that the latter policy will make Romney appear "open-minded and empirically driven." The memo does not appear to have a single author, but Savage reports that it was the product of an 18-person policy committee packed with Bush administration lawyers.

Strangely, the memo is somewhat agnostic in its belief about whether or not the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. "It is difficult to settle the question definitively," the memo states, adding later that "it is difficult to argue conclusively that enhanced interrogation techniques would have generated more information than the techniques in the Army Field Manual; we simply don't know what we don't know." Contrast that with the blanket assertions from conservatives that abandoning torture left the US vulnerable to terrorist attacks. (emphasis added)

So these are the choices in America's 2012 presidential election, and the only two people who you will be allowed to watch debate on television:

Barack Obama: who pioneered the premise of the extrajudicial killing of American citizens, the lack of any role for Congressional oversight in military adventures abroad, and the destruction of all notions of personal privacy as a civil liberty. . .

OR

Mitt Romney: who will probably do all the shit Obama did, and more, but we don't really know because even on items like torture he is more interested in looking "open-minded and empirically driven" while he does what he is told than he is in holding any belief beyond the next news conference.

As for me, like Patrick Henry, "I know not what course others may take," but I'm voting for Gary Johnson, and I won't throw any stones at anybody who votes for Jill Stein either.